News Release

San Francisco - The first 25 years of the national institution known as The New Yorker will be highlighted in A Wild Exactitude: The New Yorker, 1925-1950, a new exhibition from the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor at the San Francisco Main Library's Skylight Gallery, 100 Larkin Street, from Tuesday, April 1 through Sunday, May 25, 2003.

The exhibition chronicles the chaotic days of The New Yorker in its infancy, with its first appearance on newsstands, February 21, 1925, to the period after World War II and the end of the Ross editorship. With editor and co-founder Harold W. Ross at the helm, The New Yorker established itself as one of the most important and sophisticated magazines of the twentieth century. As Harold Ross wrote in his prospectus:

"The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk."

The books of writers and artists known to readers for their New Yorker style will be on view - from writers E. B. White and James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, John O'Hara, Wolcott Gibbs, Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash - to artists Rea Irvin, Ralph Barton, Mary Petty, Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Helen E. Hokinson, Gluyas Williams, William Steig, Saul Steinberg, and many many more. Joseph Mitchell said it best when describing the common element of style among all The New Yorker writers: "None of 'em could spell … and really none of us, including Ross, really knew anything about grammar. But each one of them … each one had a kind of wild exactitude of his own. "

Materials on display are drawn from the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor (SCOWAH), which is located in the Library's Book Arts & Special Collections Center. SCOWAH is a rich resource of New Yorker stories, novels, humorous pieces, cartoons, and biography. Nat Schmulowitz - attorney, bibliophile, and Library trustee - presented the San Francisco Public Library with a gift of 93 volumes of jest books in 1947. Since then, the collection has grown to over 20,000 volumes in 35 languages spanning 400 years of wit & humor. SCOWAH is the largest public collection of its kind in the United States. An exhibition highlighting the collection is held every April Fool's Day to celebrate Nat's extraordinary gift to the City of San Francisco.

The exhibition will be on view in the Main Library's Skylight Gallery April 1 through May 25.
During the month of May, a companion program of New Yorker-themed films, both feature and documentary, will be shown Thursdays at noon in the Koret Auditorium at the Main Library.

All programs and exhibitions at the San Francisco PublicLibrary are free and open to the public.

Skylight Gallery hours are:
Sunday 12-5; Monday 10-6; Tuesday through Thursday 9-6;
Friday 12-6; and Saturday 10-6.

For more information, please call 415.557.4400.

The Marjorie B. and Carl W. Stern Book Arts & Special Collections Center is home to the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor as well as the Grabhorn Collection on the History of Printing & the Development of the Book, and the Harrison Collection of Calligraphy & Lettering.

For more information about these collections, please contact the Book Arts & Special Collections Center at 415.557.4560.